


Pain Is a Universal Concept

by CatLovePower



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Series, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-03 03:03:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8693902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatLovePower/pseuds/CatLovePower
Summary: Set pre-series/early-series. When strange occurrences warrant an investigation, Ashley Stubbs ventures into the park alone and discovers that danger doesn't always come from where you'd expect.





	1. Chapter 1

"Hey, you!"

Ashley Stubbs raised an eyebrow and pointed a finger at his chest, questioning.

"Yeah, you," the writer gestured for him to come over.

Stubbs disliked the man and his narratives; he thought too highly of himself and his work. But he approached nonetheless.

"Could you go check on Teddy? I think a guest might be disrupting my narrative." Not Teddy's or Dolores', his. As if he was part of this fantasy world.

Stubbs quickly checked the hosts’ locations, and found some discrepancies – hosts rarely strayed far from their loop, unless they were forced to, or malfunctioning. He checked his holster and put his comm in the breast pocket of his jacket.

"Aren't you coming?" he asked when Sizemore didn't seem to follow.

"What, there?" The look of disgust on the writer's face was comical; he seemed genuinely offended that Stubbs would suggest such a thing. "I'll monitor from the control room," he said, regaining composure.

"Tell Elsie Hughes where I went, when she comes back from her meeting, will you?"

Sizemore didn't even answer, and ushered him towards the door.

*

Teddy's loop was depressingly simple and straightforward. He was madly in love with a woman who'd never be his. Some sort of tragic Sisyphus in Sizemore's mind; in Ashley's opinion, he was just a glorified pimp who led sick fucks to his beloved Dolores, invariably ending up killed while trying to defend her. Dolores's narrative was even more sad and twisted; there was so much more that could have been done with her... 

Ashley knew he shouldn't get attached to the hosts, or consider them as real beings, but he couldn't help but mull over their little stories. His footsteps echoed in the vast underbelly of the park. A "train" rushed past him, carrying ecstatic guests who would soon enjoy the full Westworld experience. At first, Ashley had understood the appeal – the thrill of endless possibilities – but the longer he worked in the park, the more cynical he seemed to have become. The narratives were far from infinite, and the guests always took the same paths, believing they were the first anywhere they went. So a disruption in a scripted loop was intriguing.

He was painfully aware that he was breaking regulations by going in the park alone. In theory, the comms worked from anywhere, and the hosts could be controlled and stopped at any time by a simple voice command. But protocol dictated that they went in pairs – probably because Ford and the powers that be wanted to keep an eye on their employees at all times and encouraged denunciation. 

Elsie had been tied up in a meeting since early in the morning; the board wanted a programmer to evaluate the feasibility of new narratives. They seemed to forget that Ford was the king of the kingdom and that nothing would be done without him anyway. There were rumors that the old man was planning something huge; some said it was going to be his swan song. 

*

The elevator deposited him in a remote wood, from hiking distance to Sweetwater and the Abernathys' ranch. Ashley suddenly wished he had a horse – real or mechanical – but the thought quickly faded away as he stepped out of the metallic booth. He didn't like riding, and there was a prohibitive amount of paperwork to be filed if you wanted to request props.

It was late morning in the park, and everything, from the buzzing of insects to the light breeze in the trees, felt real. A perfect day for a stroll, he thought. He didn't need to check the way on his comm, as he'd been here before. He found the path most visitors used to get up there, well-trodden because they were really close to the starting point of the whole thing. 

He couldn't bring himself to call it a game. A game had an ending and a set of rules. Here, guests were given a costume and a license to kill and fuck. With drinking, those were the most popular activities in the park. What a waste of money, come to think of it. But the hosts were fascinating in their life-like mannerisms. Their scripts made them more reliable and easier to understand than humans; Ashley liked that.

"Are you new around here?" a voice sounded in his back, startling him. He turned around slowly, a hand on his holster. It was one of the sheriff's men, with a shiny star pinned to his jacket lapel. 

"You look mighty clean for a traveler..." There was suspicion in the host's voice now, but it was only part of his narrative. They were programmed to overlook what they couldn't understand - modern clothes and technology, in that case.

Ashley hesitated for a second, because he wasn't a good actor and he could just as easily send the host away. Why not try, he thought.

"I'm looking for other newcomers who may have arrived recently in town."

"We get loads of those, my friend."

"These ones were out for blood, it seems. They are, er... wanted throughout the country."

"You are talking about Hector Hescaton’s men, I reckon."

"Not really, but thanks anyway," Ashley grumbled. 

"I heard there was a shooting at the Abernathys’ ranch last night," the lawman added as an afterthought. 

Ashley didn't really want a witness, albeit an android one, if they were going to need a guest extraction. But it was also amusing to hear what the hosts could make of the disruptions bending their narratives. In a sense, it gave the illusion of free will, while in reality they were nothing more than puppets with invisible strings.

In the end, he decided to let the android "show him the way to the ranch". Was his decision free will? Was it a glitch in the programming we called life? He'd need Elsie to answer that question. 

*

They smelt the fire from afar. Ashley sighed internally – props destruction was costly and meant more alterations to the existing stories for at least a couple of days. The house was nothing but smoldering ashes and billowing fumes.

There were patches of blood in the grass, and Ashley let the lawman take the lead as they went around the house, to the barn. Humans couldn't get killed by guns inside the park, but it still sting like a sob, so better safe than sorry.

They found Dolores sprawled on the ground like a broken doll. Her neck has been snapped, and she had been gutted like an animal. Her blue dress was soaked in blood, and Ashley wondered if her attackers had peaked inside, to see if her entrails were mechanical or not.

They checked the barn next, and Ashley remembered his unfortunate companion's name and back story the moment he got killed. Someone blasted a shotgun in his face from inside the barn, ruining the poor host's head.


	2. Chapter 2

Hosts could kill other hosts, of course. Some of them were even programmed to do just that, killing each other over and over for the guests to enjoy. Although they weren't supposed to aim for the head, as it was harder to salvage, errors occurred, and Ashley thought nothing of it at first. The sight of poor Dolores gutted on the floor was maybe more disturbing.

So he pushed the door of the barn, stepped over the lawman’s body, and came in, gun still in its holster. 

The scene that greeted him inside was interesting. A man he didn't recognize was holding a butcher knife in one hand and a shotgun in the other, the barrel still smoking – special effects. He was crouched over a local bandit, idly tracing thin lines on the smooth skin of his belly with the tip of the blade. Ashley couldn't tell if the host was still ticking because his eyes were closed – and he tried not to think about the tear tracks in his stained cheeks. It was usually Dolores who lay there, used and abused.

The guy raised his head and smiled. It was a weird smile, which felt unscripted and out of place, and Ashley hesitated for a second. He was dressed as a rancher, fatigued slacks and a shirt which hadn't been white for a long time. The pit stains and the stubble made Ashley doubt his identity.

That's what he hated the most about this place: not the too real hosts, but the way guests started to blend in after a while. They slowly became indiscernible from the rest, and the only way to tell them apart was their reaction to impossible events. They were not programmed to act unsurprised when they saw something out of place. And this guy seemed amused, curious and dangerous, but not in the least surprised. 

"Can I help you?" he asked, stopping his carving, but still toying with the gun.

"I'm looking for a gunslinger named Teddy," Ashley said, trying to remember if he had already seen the face of the person he was talking to. Damn Sizemore and his ever changing narratives.

"He squealed more than his girl,” the man said, gripping his knife tightly. He slashed across the host’s throat, without any hesitation. The bandit gurgled, bled some more, then stopped moving for good, now waiting for the retrieval team to come get him.

“Cease all motor functions,” Ashley tried, because he didn’t like the glint in his eye.

“Doesn’t work on me, pal,” the man said, smirking. 

Definitively human, then. It was just another psychopath looking for a good time in a world where murder had no consequences. A glitchy host would have been more interesting. 

“Alright,” Ashley said as he took a step forward, “what did you do with Teddy? The readings are—”

But he never got to finish his sentence. Pain exploded in his head, blinding and sudden. He got thrown to the ground before he could understand what happened. He woke up to a mouthful of straw and dancing lights in front of his eyes. Someone started laughing in his back.

*

Elsie was pissed; Sizemore was beginning to think he shouldn't have told the programmer anything. She was hunched over the computer, checking positions and graphs and things the writer didn’t really care about. 

“It doesn’t make sense. Why did he go to the ranch if Teddy was AWOL?”

“That’s the problem,” Sizemore piped in. “Teddy’s location is unclear.”

“How come? I only see one position and it’s miles from the ranch.” Elsie gestured towards the computer screen, clearly frustrated.

“There were glitches. The computer seemed to believe that he was in two different places at the same time.”

“Impossible,” Elsie said, staring at the screen. She had tried raising Stubbs several times already, to no avail.

"Not entirely impossible," Sizemore corrected. "There are secondary trackers in case—"

"Fuck!" Elsie cut him off. "You mean someone hacked Teddy into pieces?"

There was no horror in the programmer's eyes, only disbelief and anger. After all, a single host was worth a huge amount of money and she spent the whole morning listening to the board arguing about costs. 

"So a guest is responsible?" 

"I think so. And a smart one, they ditched trackers and weapons, they're totally off the grid." Sizemore tried to hide the smugness in his voice, because he had predicted that such a thing would happen, and security – Stubbs – had dismissed the problem as too minor to worry about.

"And where the hell is everyone?" Elsie suddenly exclaimed, looking around the desert control room.

"Lunch break." Sizemore shrugged.

"And you don't eat?"

"I don't like when people mess with my stories..."

"You're coming with me then," Elsie said. 

Sizemore didn't know if it was because of diffuse sense of guilt, or because Elsie was triggering some animal part of his brain, but he felt compelled to obey.

"I need to change first."

They'd need guns, guards and good shoes. He wasn't going in the park wearing dress shoes.

"You wanna play dress up when Stubbs isn't responding?"

"He's head of security, he can wait," Sizemore said. 

The string of muttered insults told him that Elsie didn't believe that one bit. 

*

They shot him. In the head. The absurdity of it was hitting Ashley now that the pain had cleared. Did they think his head would explode like the lawman's had? He was still sitting on the floor of the barn, next to a now cold bandit. He raised a hand to check the back of his head; the "bullet" didn't break the skin, but there was a welt beneath his fingers. 

“Those guns are a funny invention,” the newcomer in his back said. “Come to think of it, it’s quite unfair to the hosts…” 

Ashley raised his head and took in the burly man in a dark suit. He looked young, maybe mid-thirties, with dirty blond hair falling into his eyes, and the same questionable hygiene as his friend. 

“So it’s a good thing we also have blades,” he continued.

He had the same smile that said “psycho”, and when he unsheathed a cleaver from his belt, Ashley knew he had to act fast. He took his gun out and fired at the cleaver-wielding visitor; it was a modified stun gun, which could stop a host dead in their tracks, but only winded and dazed humans. His attacker took a step back, rubbed his chest and kept coming. Ashley fired again twice, but either this man had a terribly high pain threshold, or he wore some sort of protection under his clothes. As a last resort, he tried to tackle him, but they were two and they quickly got the upper hand. Elsie was going to kill him, if those two didn’t succeed first.


	3. Chapter 3

Sizemore saw himself as a hedonist and a word lover. The stories he built in the park were not unlike the ones he wrote for pulp magazines when he was a teen – the main differences were the number of zeros on his paycheck and the furniture in his office. One could argue that the four dimensional nature of the game added a lot to the narratives, but for Sizemore it was still the same old stories. Most of the time, the visitors either didn't care about the nice parts, or the hosts got killed before they could reach the pivotal points.

He knew that his co-workers didn't like him – or downright hated him, in Elsie's case – because he was an arrogant bastard who thought highly of himself. Why hide it? It was part of his character, so to speak. And he intended to take Ford's place as lead writer when the old man finally figured it was time for him to step down. Or when the board got to their senses and fired him.

The jolt of the elevator got him out of his daydream, when Elsie punched in the code to get in the park. He stroked his right ear, a nervous gesture not unlike the reveries Ford wanted to increment on the hosts. Was that small gesture making him more human? Doubtful. And it wasn't what the visitors were here for anyway.

"Sector 45-b," Elsie rattled, eyes fixed on the small screen in her hand. "Rough terrain, some caves."

"A good place to hide," Sizemore commented.

Like he cared. He only wanted to see what they had done to Teddy, and if they'd go as far as trying the same on Stubbs. He wondered which one would win in a fight if the game wasn't rigged in favor of the humans.

"I'm getting intermittent signals from Stubbs' communicator. Enough to get us close."

"What about security?" Sizemore asked, indicating the empty elevator. He tried to hide the fear in his voice, but didn't quite succeed.

"Two guards will be waiting for us, don't worry."

The writer said nothing, but Elsie already knew what he thought of the security in the park. What he thought of the whole concept of letting crazy clients and lifelike androids roam free together. The storylines were always messed up in the end.

*

That day was getting better and better, Ashley thought, as he woke up at the entrance of a cave, next to a bleeding Teddy. He had a pounding headache, and they had stripped of his comm and his gun.

He wondered if they were trying to steal parts. In theory, nothing made in the park could get out of the park. Not even a pebble or a leaf. In reality, security turned a blind eye to those kinds of petty thefts and focused essentially on corporate espionage. Parts were worth nothing, but patents were priceless. Maybe that was his new friends' endgame.

The fact that they left them alone, without restraining them, was worrisome in itself. Ashley suddenly recalled a group of hunters who captured hosts before releasing them in the wild and hunting them down. Higher-ups had refused to put an end to it right away. They maimed and tortured at least twenty hosts before someone finally estimated that it was costing the park too much and let Stubbs intervene.

His best chance right now was to wait for someone to track him down. Everyone working in the park was required to have a subcutaneous tracker implanted, so that it was impossible to get lost – mainly to avoid lawsuits in case of accident. A former employee won millions after he sued the park for putting his life at risk; he fell down a crevice and waited two days to be rescued.

Then Teddy started to stir beside him. He was holding his arm, curled up around it defensively. Ashley realized half his limb was missing, and someone had tied cloth around the stump, but it was still bleeding. So they didn’t want the host dead, but they also didn’t care about mangling him.

“You…” Teddy started to say, his voice gravely. He blinked and tried to focus on Ashley, but one of his pupils was blown. “You should run if you can.”

Ashley tried to stand, using the wall of the cave to steady himself. He got to his feet without too much wobbling, and then turned to Teddy to help him up. But the host shook his head and gestured to his legs. The angle was unnatural, as if someone had bashed the tibias repeatedly with… something.

“Great…” Ashley said between his teeth. He was hoping to use the host as either leverage or help against the psychos who snatched him. That was not happening.

“Do you know where they put my communicator?”

“It…” Teddy hesitated, licking his dry lips. “It does mean anything to me.”

“Looks like a polished stone, rectangular shape, black,” Ashley supplied, feeling antsy. He knew he should leave, but he didn’t like the idea of being stranded in the park without any communication or guidance.

“That blow to the head must’ve rattled your brain,” Teddy smiled, “because you’re not making any sense.”

*

Somewhere deep in the entrails of the park, two technicians were working on Dolores’ body. They restored her to her original pristine condition, while pestering against savage visitors, and discussing the latest baseball game.

The scalpel widened a cut, fingers pried into the wound, wiggling around and taking out any remnants of the fight at the ranch. Twigs and pebbles, blood and gunshot pellets. Agile hands re-aligned the vertebras with a series of sickening cracks, and the dermal regenerator erased the small cuts on her forehead.

The technicians didn’t wonder what happened. After all, it wasn’t their job to question the motives of either the park writers or the visitors. By now, they had seen enough gritty wounds to supply a lifetime of nightmares, so they learned to push it out of their mind while they worked, thinking about the mechanic of the body, not about the host itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took so long to update. The finale didn't answer all my questions, and then I got distracted by Leverage.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea how many chapters it will be (probably 3 or 4) - expect updates every two-three day.  
> You can drop me a line on Tumblr (see link on profile - nitpickers welcomed!), as English is not my first language and I could use the help sometimes.


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